


The Black and White pillars of existence

by ArsitRouke



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-11
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 08:51:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8006428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArsitRouke/pseuds/ArsitRouke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only question was whether it helped or hurt. Whether it was Right or Wrong. These were the fundamental forces behind it all, the black and white pillars of existence. What most people considered good and evil were… pale imitations, guesses made by those that couldn’t feel what was Right and Wrong in their bones and blood and every fibre of their beings the way he did. It was as much a fact as his need to breathe air to stay alive, and he had to surrender himself to it just the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Black and White pillars of existence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marietcaelum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/marietcaelum/gifts).



> This is basically a very personal interpretation of Hilbert, and a piece reflecting thoughts about how extreme hypermorality is so far removed from most people's experiences with morals that it can easily be confused with amorality.

There were a great many things Dmitri Volodin didn’t remember.

He didn’t remember much of his childhood, and the few memories he did have felt like they belonged to someone else, someone that he found hard to believe had been him once, so fundamentally different from who he was now.

Something that he did remember, though, was the anger. The rage against a world that was Wrong. He had had so much taken away from him when he was still too young to understand, forced to face so much of the worst this world had to offer. And there was a part of him, something inside him, that had started burning with such a righteous fury, an anger that couldn’t be contained just inside this fragile human body, cosmic and vast in scale.

It was so much bigger than him. It was a pure, breath-taking certainty. The world was broken, so much of it was so dark, so ugly, so terribly uncaringly cruel. He was just as sure of this as he was that it was his responsibility to fix it.

Of course, he knew he couldn’t fix all of it. He was still a profoundly realistic man. But that didn’t change the visceral and inescapable drive to do as much as he humanly could, and dedicate his entire life to it. So he studied, he improved himself, he honed his mind and his entire being into a tool that would allow him to pursue his objective. Outside of his life’s work, he had nothing, allowed himself nothing. There was the research, the experiments, the planning. Nothing more. Most days he barely felt like a real person.

Maybe if the incident hadn’t happen. If he had had anything else to focus on, a family, something more immediate and mundane to keep him from turning his gaze towards the cold, hard truth of the universe… Maybe then he wouldn’t have slipped so far into it, would have had a reason not to lose himself, a reason to value his humanity instead of discarding it as in inconvenience. But the way things panned out, it couldn’t have turned out any other way.

The only question was whether it helped or hurt. Whether it was Right or Wrong. These were the fundamental forces behind it all, the black and white pillars of existence. What most people considered good and evil were… pale imitations, guesses made by those that couldn’t _feel_ what was Right and Wrong in their bones and blood and every fibre of their beings the way he did. It was as much a fact as his need to breathe air to stay alive, and he had to surrender himself to it just the same.  

So, yes, sometimes that meant doing things that most would consider evil. It was necessary. Saying that he thought the end justified the means didn’t even begin to cover it. The end was the inevitability of pursuing what was Right, and the means never factored into it. He had given his entire being over to the cause already. What sense could it possibly make to avoid being ‘evil’, and even cruel, and harming that cause? So it’d be easier to live with himself, easier to sleep at night? That would have been profoundly selfish. And he had never needed much sleep anyway.

His own life only had value as long as he could keep advancing his life’s work, and contributed more alive than dead. Otherwise it was utterly worthless. There was no sense in preserving any dignity, any pride, any virtue. If turning himself into a monster would help him accomplish this thing that would save countless lives, this thing that needed to be done because it was Right, then that was exactly what he’d do.  

It didn’t mean he would like it. He hadn’t liked many of the things he had done, but all the same he had never hesitated. He had the most firm conviction guiding his hand. As a background to everything, every single second of his life, he had the knowledge that he himself didn’t matter at all. His identity was unimportant – He was whatever name he found himself using at the time, and shred it when it was necessary to change into a new name, a new identity just as meaningless as the last. If there was a constant there, a real person under the lies and the plans, they didn’t matter. His feelings, his grief, the pain of watching yet another human being die because of what he had done to them, none of it mattered at all. In the grand scheme of things it was all just temporary. Useless. It would never erase the certainty that this was the Right Thing To Do. And so he knew, if he had the chance, he’d do it all over again.

It didn’t matter what he had to give up. Who he had to hurt. How far he had to go.

He was going to do what was Right.


End file.
